The British Politics Thread
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legaldinho wrote:legaldinho wrote:monkey wrote:I think you're too pessimistic about the Labour Party. Ed Milliband would have looked out for the little guy. There's plenty others of his ilk there. And I really think the tide is turning away from the same old neoliberal policies. If they take charge now with a decent leader with the support of the majority of the country, they can make some huge changes for the better.
Miliband got destroyed at the general. By the media. The core vote didn't turn out. Young people didn't turn out. As Peter hitchens said, Jezza is the only politician who actually speaks to the core voter. If the grassroots can deliver, he can win.
This idea of moderating labour policies only for the media to trounce it and the average guy to ask "what's the point" is suicidal in the extreme. You've bought the lie hook line and sinker
Proud of this post from June 2016. Recent articles suggest this was seumas Milne's and others strategy all along: don't cooperate, shed core voters and new voters,only to be trounced by the media anyway. Sometimes I think i should make something of myself. I personally don't know many people who are as consistently right about things as me.
Hello. -
For clarity, monkey, a few of us here have had benefits stopped immediately following grossly unfair sanctions. My mum's Carer's Allowance had to be reinstated after Atos took it away, even though she was 65 at the time. My sister's hospital was closed a few years ago, taking its first-rate head-injury and burns care with it.
Like the master who prefers to beat his slaves on the quiet, the Tories' evils are largely under the public's radar. And so in Corbyn we saw a flawed man of genuine conviction, because unlike Miliband — who was in favour of Atos at worst, and in favour of retaining sanctions at best — he listened to Ken Loach. He's listened to the affected. Smith would've ignored those helpless voters (also the homeless, the poor, and so on) and handed May her majority in one weak chop.
Humanitarianism's now exclusively left-wing in this country, so his lot can jog on. -
Childintime wrote:legaldinho wrote:legaldinho wrote:monkey wrote:I think you're too pessimistic about the Labour Party. Ed Milliband would have looked out for the little guy. There's plenty others of his ilk there. And I really think the tide is turning away from the same old neoliberal policies. If they take charge now with a decent leader with the support of the majority of the country, they can make some huge changes for the better.
Miliband got destroyed at the general. By the media. The core vote didn't turn out. Young people didn't turn out. As Peter hitchens said, Jezza is the only politician who actually speaks to the core voter. If the grassroots can deliver, he can win.
This idea of moderating labour policies only for the media to trounce it and the average guy to ask "what's the point" is suicidal in the extreme. You've bought the lie hook line and sinker
Proud of this post from June 2016. Recent articles suggest this was seumas Milne's and others strategy all along: don't cooperate, shed core voters and new voters,only to be trounced by the media anyway. Sometimes I think i should make something of myself. I personally don't know many people who are as consistently right about things as me.
Hello.
You are one of the people hugs xoxoxoxoxo
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Escape wrote:For clarity, monkey, a few of us here have had benefits stopped immediately following grossly unfair sanctions. My mum's Carer's Allowance had to be reinstated after Atos took it away, even though she was 65 at the time. My sister's hospital was closed a few years ago, taking its first-rate head-injury and burns care with it.
Like the master who prefers to beat his slaves on the quiet, the Tories' evils are largely under the public's radar. And so in Corbyn we saw a flawed man of genuine conviction, because unlike Miliband — who was in favour of Atos at worst, and in favour of retaining sanctions at best — he listened to Ken Loach. He's listened to the affected. Smith would've ignored those helpless voters (also the homeless, the poor, and so on) and handed May her majority in one weak chop.
Humanitarianism's now exclusively left-wing in this country, so his lot can jog on.
Young people, poor people, and the outcasts who never vote, some of them voted because they believe him. He is for real. People are switched off by the bullshit, the immaculate ignore ur question and give you my soundbite, the "let me be absolutely clear' and so on.
The left who would have voted anyway, like monkey and me, voted for him anyway.
You get a game player and you lose those people. The Tories didn't fuck up this election, they are a great party with money and skilled people doing their shiz. They got their vote out and even stole labour and ukip voters up north. That was cos of brexit.
But no matter how good they get, the conservatives simply cannot ever appeal to more than 33% of the population. They just can't. They poll higher cos turnout has been relatively poor since the 90s (see said bullshit referred to above). With the labour pros actually campaigning with the corbyn movement, who knows what can happen next. As in, what would have happened if labour had actually campaigned in Putney or Hastings. What if Scottish labour wasn't such a fuck up which rejected corbyn, and used his popularity to hoover up lefty SNP votes and unionist votes off the Tories.
Nothing is worse than pride getting in the way of progress. Feds up monkey, and give this movement, the first left wing movement in this country since lord knows when, it's due.
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Gonz is spot-on there, I think.
Tory regional gains were because of Brexit, Labour gains everywhere were because of Corbyn. He’s seen as a man of conviction who actually cares about the people of the UK rather than the imaginary romantic notion of UK Plc. That makes him the figurehead of a genuine left opposition.
The only fly in the ointment has been Scottish Labour’s distancing of themselves from Corbyn. If they’d supported him all along, the Tories would not have gained a damn thing up here and Westminster might look very different right now. -
I think there's a lot of misunderstanding of my position here. I wanted Corbyn in charge. I still think he needed to win the first leadership contest to break the austerity grip on politics. Ed or David Milquetoast wouldn't have got all the disaffected engaged in the same way and I've never claimed otherwise.
From 9th June
If Corbyn had gone after Brexit, the PLP would have put forward 5 candidates and the most left-wing one would have won. Who would that have been? Would they have been any good? Would they have been legit or an Owen Smith, badly-disguised, wolf in sheeps clothing? Would they have managed to straddle left-wing policy directions (which I was, am and will remain in favour of) with a more centrist appeal? If they had would that have caused an earlier rift in the Tories? May moved right and became UKIP because she had to but also because she felt that the centre was already won.monkey wrote:Yeah there's pros and cons to Corbyn electorally, and I was completely wrong about that, because I thought that the pros were so minute as to be irrelevant, when they were actually quite substantial. It's for the birds to try and weigh that up against the pros and cons of another hypothetical Labour leader taking hypothetical positions in an hypothetically different campaign. How would Owen Smith have gone over? Or Yvette Cooper? Who knows?
Labour have got a left-wing policy platform that is way more credible than anything on the right. It's something to build on and there should be another chance very soon. Hopefully the Tory Brexit chaos will ruin any rebranding attempts a new leader will make and Labour can form a genuinely progressive government.
Corbyn has done zilch against the Tories for two years, occupying the leadership like a knackered old zombie, doing almost nothing of note and suddenly sprang into life at the last minute.
If he'd been 1/10th the Leader of the Opposition over that time that he has been for the past couple of months, I might have felt differently. Factors contributing to Labour's vote were Corbyn's personal appeal (which I underestimated), their manifesto (which wouldn't have happened without Corbyn) but also huge opposition to hard brexit, austerity fatigue, May being a shambles, the Tories having no ideas or direction, their entire ideology being a washed-up and vacuous sham for impoverishing the country. Among the factors that let May win are aversion to Corbyn of old morons and huge support for hard brexit. It's literally impossible to pick all that apart and say definitively that Corbyn was the one factor that brought about the collapse of the Tories and no other leader could have done better.
I've never thought it was really possible for Corbyn-led Labour to win a GE. If I'm wrong about that, good, great in fact. But I'm not wrong yet. -
I didn’t think it was possible either, but now I do.
All I wanted when I voted for Corbyn as Labour leader was for him to pull Labour back into shape as a realistic left-leaning opposition in Westminster with a decent number of seats. He’s done that. Now though, I believe they can do more. That’s really hopeful. -
I'm not convinced by this idea that Corbyn spent 2 years doing nothing then suddenly put in a good election campaign. His inexperience in leadership certainly showed to begin with, but not surprisingly he improved as time went on. Other than that it was a case of introducing a different kind of politics to the one kind we're so used to now, which people (egged on by the media) took for incompetence. It's the same people complaining about how all politicians are the same and just lie or never answer questions that were often the first to dismiss Corbyn for not doing the thing that other politicians would have done in a certain situation. That he had a better than expected election campaign isn't to do with a sudden shift, it's to do with sticking to his guns and starting to reap the benefits among people who really are sick of politics as usual.
I also think the idea of straddling left-wing policy with centrist appeal is problematic, as they just aren't compatible anymore. Centrist appeal means keeping things broadly as they are, while an actual progressive left movement means making substantial changes. The only hope for Labour is the far more difficult but much more meaningful task of bringing the centre to the left, or changing what centrist appeal is. I don't know that that's possible either, but there's some momentum there now.
I think it's possible to say with a good degree of certainty that none of the leadership candidates we saw in the last couple of years would have engaged the people that Corbyn engaged and won over the New Labour voters who have since gone back to the Tories. That's far more a case of wishful thinking than viewing Corbyn as electable. -
As an outsider, Corbyn looks like a man who has found his moment.
The UK will be lucky if he seizes it. You need him and his policies, dearly."Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness." ― Terry Pratchett -
There were too many reports of early incompetence that were coming from non-media sources for that to be entirely dismissed as just 'doing politics differently'.
Still, I'm glad he seems to have turned it around. -
The problem then is whether you can actually implement these policies nowadays without the economy imploding. The market would presumably shit itself, after all.Vela wrote:As an outsider, Corbyn looks like a man who has found his moment. The UK will be lucky if he seizes it. You need him and his policies, dearly. -
Good job I didn't do that then.Yossarian wrote:There were too many reports of early incompetence that were coming from non-media sources for that to be entirely dismissed as just 'doing politics differently'. -
JonB wrote:I'm not convinced by this idea that Corbyn spent 2 years doing nothing then suddenly put in a good election campaign. His inexperience in leadership certainly showed to begin with, but not surprisingly he improved as time went on. Other than that it was a case of introducing a different kind of politics to the one kind we're so used to now, which people (egged on by the media) took for incompetence. It's the same people complaining about how all politicians are the same and just lie or never answer questions that were often the first to dismiss Corbyn for not doing the thing that other politicians would have done in a certain situation. That he had a better than expected election campaign isn't to do with a sudden shift, it's to do with sticking to his guns and starting to reap the benefits among people who really are sick of politics as usual.
I also think the idea of straddling left-wing policy with centrist appeal is problematic, as they just aren't compatible anymore. Centrist appeal means keeping things broadly as they are, while an actual progressive left movement means making substantial changes. The only hope for Labour is the far more difficult but much more meaningful task of bringing the centre to the left, or changing what centrist appeal is. I don't know that that's possible either, but there's some momentum there now.
I think it's possible to say with a good degree of certainty that none of the leadership candidates we saw in the last couple of years would have engaged the people that Corbyn engaged and won over the New Labour voters who have since gone back to the Tories. That's far more a case of wishful thinking than viewing Corbyn as electable.
Spot on. He was sabotaged by his own colleagues. He was monstered by the press too. I remember, not paying much attention, that my view of corbyn declined. Around the time of the anti-Semitism thing I started to go to YouTube to hear directly what he said, and all of a sudden my niggles evaporated.
That said, yes, he isn't the smartest person in the world. He wouldn't get into Oxbridge. He has a mild case of misspeak when reading a speech, AND!....a weird cadence when linking sentences.
But fuck all that. Time to accept he is the only labour figure that can excite young uns and bring the disillusioned out to vote. If the party machinery could tap into that, we could end up with a landslide victory next, if Scots can sort their shit out.
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Corbyn's improvement was so drastic it can't just be put down to standard improvement in a job. The PLP have left him alone since the second leadership contest and he's still been woeful.
Centrism doesn't necessarily mean status quo. Failed left-centrism would be e.g. Ed Miliband's tuition fee idea of reducing fees to £6,000. It's effectively pointless. People that are against them aren't going to race out and vote for a 30% reduction in the same way they did for scrapping them entirely. And even if they did, it doesn't really solve the problem. Successful left-centrism is scrapping them entirely but explaining clearly how it can be afforded and why it's in the country's long-term economic benefit to do so. Corbyn sort of did that. I don't think he's all that wacky economically anyway. Long-term public investment isn't a left-wing crackpot idea, nor is public ownership of infrastructure, skills training, house building, it's just been made to feel that way. It's always been his less orthodox foreign and defence positions that were the problem.
Last paragraph I completely agree with. Cooper, Kendall, Burnham, Owen Smith, Angela Eagle. No one can know but I doubt any of them would have stood a chance. Edit - last paragraph refers to Jons post but equally applies to Gonz. -
JonB wrote:
The problem then is whether you can actually implement these policies nowadays without the economy imploding. The market would presumably shit itself, after all.Vela wrote:As an outsider, Corbyn looks like a man who has found his moment. The UK will be lucky if he seizes it. You need him and his policies, dearly.
The economy is currently predicated on austerity at all costs, bugger the consequences. Corbyn's spending is basically Keynesian, innit? Spend in times of crisis, provide important services at a loss because they are necessary and the private system is experiencing market failure.
It's the alternative to tax cuts for the rich and palace refurbs over NHS investment. A simple choice.
Torynomics is a perversion of capitalism. Fuck it off into the bin."Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness." ― Terry Pratchett -
I think "reports of incompetence" is an interesting way of putting it.
By and large I reckon if anyone wanted to they could scrutinise any politician and drag up enough to make them look like an incompetent dope. As evidence: check out how the message around Theresa May has completely flipped turned upside down. -
Thread has moved on a lot since I started writing this, but I wrote it so I'll post it.
I have to say Monkey, I think what happened here is that Escape was right.
Corbyn was buried under a shower of negative press, and attacks from his own team. Under an election cycle, where press coverage has to be fairer people saw him for what he was and his stock grew.
Now that he's got to where he is, it's very hard for further attacks to stick, the manifesto proved popular, so large parts of it will need to be retained, and he's basically safe from further attempts to unseat him.
You of course can't say definitively that another leader would have done better. But you can say that Labour had lower numbers of votes under Blair, Brown and Milliband every year since 1997. You can say that under the other options presented in 2015, and the two options in 2016, it's extraordinarily unlikely that Labour would have managed the votes they did. Perhaps there is a potential leader in there who would have clinched this election. Would there have been an election at all in that case though?
You say that Corbyn was left alone aft the second leadership election, but that isn't really true is it? The total attack was dialed down, and there was no imminent leadership challenge. But MP's kept moaning about Corbyn being unelectable, and Labour being wiped out under any election he'd lead them in. In the election period they all were at pains to distance themselves from the leader, and publicly told anyone who'd listen that's what they were doing.
More important than winning an election though, I think that Corbyn has succeeded in dragging politics back to the left. That sets up Labour, and the policy that he is in favour of very nicely for future elections. -
Corbyn turnaround is in some part due to media fairness but it's far from just being that. He did things like take opportunities to speak directly to millions of people on tv, speak to journalists when asked questions and have an upbeat sound bite prepared rather than trudging past them silently like an animated corpse.
More people voted for Corbyn than Leader X is somewhat negated by the fact that more people voted against Corbyn than voted against Leader X as well. -
Is "media fairness" not an oxymoron? -
monkey wrote:Corbyn's improvement was so drastic it can't just be put down to standard improvement in a job. The PLP have left him alone since the second leadership contest and he's still been woeful.
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It's because when the campaign kicked off, the broadcasters were regulated as a matter of law. That is all it is. There was no improvement really, except that you get better on the stump as you go on, everyone does normally. All it is is lots of us got t hear him loud and clear.
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Also: that kind of performance is his top rank on his top trumps card. He was great in the labour leadership elections too.
His relative absence in the eu referendum feels an aching disappointment now as well, but I guess if his enthusiasm is low for it you wouldn't get the same level performance. (And he probably wouldn't be the politician he is if he went back on it). -
I can't shake the feeling he's gonna get done for noncing, like Rolf. -
Not because I think he's probably a nonce, just believing in the worst in this shit universe. It's all going too well.
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Of course, but it's a different world now to the one where Keynesian policies were seen as acceptable. The likes of Clinton in the US and Hollande in France came into power with big ideas, only to be told they couldn't do it without the economy tanking. They soon fell into neoliberal orthodoxy. I'm not sure that any individual national government actually wields the power anymore.Vela wrote:
The economy is currently predicated on austerity at all costs, bugger the consequences. Corbyn's spending is basically Keynesian, innit? Spend in times of crisis, provide important services at a loss because they are necessary and the private system is experiencing market failure. It's the alternative to tax cuts for the rich and palace refurbs over NHS investment. A simple choice. Torynomics is a perversion of capitalism. Fuck it off into the bin.
The problem then is whether you can actually implement these policies nowadays without the economy imploding. The market would presumably shit itself, after all.As an outsider, Corbyn looks like a man who has found his moment. The UK will be lucky if he seizes it. You need him and his policies, dearly. -
Back to Corbyn and Labour, it can hardly be disputed that the biggest fuck up in the last 2 years was the leadership challenge after Brexit. It's that which made them look a total shambles, regardless of what Corbyn had or hadn't done.
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Yeah, that was basically suicide, but I guess at least twats like Hillary Ben finally realised they don't have any power any more.
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There was no other acceptable result for Labour than Corbyn winning in 2015. Centrist, lefitie, whatever. You don't adopt Tory lies as your own because you lack the wherewithal to counter them. The other contenders were rightly trounced and didn't learn lessons from their defeat.
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